No Parking Ticket For Pieter van Vollenhoven

Volkskrant reports that two car-park attendents of the private company ‘Parkeercombinatie Holland’ wrote two fines for the two Audi cars that were wrongly parked at the pavement in front of the shop of ‘Oger’ in the PC Hooftstraat. The cars were transporting Prof. Pieter van Vollenhoven, brother-in-law of queen Beatrix, who apparently had some suits to buy in the favourite shopping street of the Amsterdam nouveau riche.

When the two men want to put the fine on the cars, three men, two bodyguards and a driver dressed in a police uniform, left the shop and start talking to the two car-park attendents, who hesitated and did not put the fine on the cars after all. The cameras of AT5, Amsterdam’s local television station, record the scene and a small local drama is born. Employees of city district Oud-Zuid says that they saw the clip and that their policy is that anybody that parks on the pavement is fined. They have been in touch with ‘Parkeercombinatie Holland’ and their spokesman Jorrit Visser says: ‘It won’t happen again’.

Frans Zuiderhoek, of the national police (KLPD) says that he did not see the clip but that if the car was parked wrongly, it was not the responsibility of Prof. Pieter van Vollenhoven but of the people in charge of his security. Zuiderhoek was in touch with the three security officers of the professor, they claim that they did not ask the car-park attendents not to give them a ticket at all.

See a clip of the ‘incident’ at the website of AT5, clickhere. And the article in Dutch from the Volkskrant here.